Our Essential Being is Inward
Alanis Morissette’s hit song, “You Oughta Know” became a battle cry for those who knew the bitterness of a significant other finding someone else. When we’re emotional, we like to listen to songs that resonate with what we’re feeling. But they only pacify you for a short time. They don’t heal you.
We then crave sensory pleasures that distract us from our pain. We eat, drink, gamble, engage in excessive sexual pleasures — anything that pulls us away from our feelings. No, we say, we don’t want to feel. We even look for ways to suppress our thoughts. But these don’t heal you, either.
James Allen writes that solitude is essential in bringing balance and wholeness back into our lives.
The outward world of pleasure, personal contact, and noisy activities is a sphere of wear and tear which necessitates the counterbalancing effect of solitude.
Allen maintains that solitude is a place to return to gather our strength within. It is a clean, deep inhale when the challenges and the conflicts of the world deplete us of oxygen. An inner life plays an intrinsic role in our wellbeing.
Man’s essential being is inward, invisible, spiritual, and as such it derives its life, strength, from within, not from without. Outward things are channels through which its energies are expended, but for renewal it must…
